Local Listing - Same Business, New Location, Branded with a Different Name

I have a client with a unique situation. They have a strong local listing presence, especially their Google Business Listing with 168 5 star reviews. It is a dental practice, named after the neighborhood they are located in within our city. They are opening a new practice, in a new neighborhood, and are sticking with the branding strategy of naming the new location after the neighborhood, but it is still the same business. We do not want to lose the positive presence from the other location that is already in place, especially for reviews, by creating entirely new business listings. I know you can have the same business name, but add an address as a new location. But how do you do this with two different business names? Example below:

Westside Dental (current business that is expanding)

Eastside Dental (new location, same business, branded with a different name but will support existing patients and new ones)

1 Response

I agree with you that this is an unusual situation. By branding the new business location differently than the original one, your client is, in effect, creating a totally different business. Here are their three options:

1) Decide not to change the brand name for the second location. Maintain a single website and create two landing pages on it to cover the two locations. Get a different phone number for the new location and create a new GMB listing for it with the new info on it. Unless there is something really confusing about the name of the business, this will be the easiest way to go. The branding in your examples is kind of generic: "Westside". Is the real-world case this generic? If so, I'd urge the client to go with option 1 as any benefits from being called "Eastside" at the second location are likely to be heavily outweighed by the work involved in option 2.

2) If they are absolutely set on a new brand name for the second location, then it must be treated as a totally separate business. Build a separate website, obviously have a unique phone number, and then go about building out GMB for them. The trouble here is that the dental practice will then be responsible for creating, maintaining and marketing two different websites. Kind of a pain.

3) The third option involves rebranding the whole practice, which circumstances may warrant. So, for example, let's say the real-world name of the original location is Hayes St. Dental, and this has worked well while the practice had a single location on Hayes St. Now, they're opening a new location on Garfield St. and it's going to be confusing to patients (and search engines) to have a Hayes St. Dental located on Garfield St. If the branding is that specific, and the practice is at a turning point of expansion, it may be time to rethink the entire branding. I saw a convenience store go through this once. It has previously been named something like San Diego Quickmart. Then, the family moved to a completely different city, but continued calling themselves by the original name, and it was very peculiar looking. Now may well be the time for the dental practice to nip this thing in the bud by rebranding more generically, or you can see the future in which they're going to have to build a third website when they open a new location on Madison St., a fourth website when they expand to Lincoln St., etc. This could quickly get totally out of hand, right?

So, it may be that it's time to rename the the entire practice with an eye to future growth. If the client decides to go this route, let me know and I can give you guidelines for them editing their original GMB listing with best hopes of maintaining their reputation. The good thing would be that once this work was accomplished, there would no barriers to expansion, and each new location can simply be represented on a single (growing) website, a unique GMB listing per locale and other citations.